Monday, March 9, 2015

Guest post from Ed Barajas, author of The Quiet Revolution

This is a different view of our criminal justice system in a way that challenges the negative portrayals from people considered experts. Contrary to the prevailing view of most experts describing a broken and inhumane system, something appears to be working.
For the past twenty years crime has taken a plunge in the US and the experts appear to be clueless regarding the cause. Barajas suggests the reason for less crime is because of an ongoing transformation of the justice system that is more focused on public safety and working in concert with the community and other service agencies.

Recent
news from California suggests that crime has spiked in response to court orders
and new policies to reduce prison crowding.This should serve as a lesson in how bad policy leads to disaster.Other states are currently attempting
criminal justice reform but should pause to consider some crucial questions.

Criminal
justice certainly needs major improvements.The problem is that the current reform movement is actually an
anti-incarceration effort.This movement
has been active for several years but rather than a systemic approach to reform,
its main goal is to reduce incarceration.This is like trying to reform healthcare by aiming to reduce
hospitalization.Just as hospitals are a
small part of the healthcare system, prisons are a small part of the criminal
justice system.

Reform
efforts are wrong headed because they’re based on a false premise—mass
incarceration.The object is to place
more offenders in alternatives, or community supervision, by using misleading
information that prisons are a drain on the economy and needlessly used on the
wrong types of offenders.

Despite
rhetoric about “mass incarceration” and calls for "alternative
sentences" the major portion of offenders is serving time in an alternative
status of community supervision.About
two thirds of individuals serving time are under community supervision. One
could say that in this country incarceration is an alternative sentence.In some states the community supervision
population constitutes more than eighty percent of the total corrections
population.

Experts
in the reform movement rely on misleading assumptions about safely releasing large
numbers of non-violent offenders. Experts provide the answers but we need to
ask the right questions. Should we only incarcerate
violent offenders? Should we never incarcerate car thieves, burglars, drug dealers,
swindlers and others?The California
crime spike involves a high number of these types of offenses.

What
exactly is a non-violent offender? Is it someone who’s never committed a
violent crime? Is it someone convicted of a non-violent crime but with a
history of violence? Is it someone who committed a violent crime but was
convicted of a non-violent crime because of plea-bargaining? Al Capone was
convicted of tax evasion.Without asking
these questions, he’d be considered a non-violent offender.The point is that sentencing statistics
provide only a snapshot of the person's current offense.

The
reform movement thus demands that the system do what it’s already doing and has
been doing for decades—incarcerate only a relatively small proportion of
offenders.We’re also told that we
should spend more money on education rather than on prisons but the fact is
that our country spends ten times more on education than on prisons.The problem is not too many people in
prison.The problem is the system’s
misguided purpose.

The
system is never tasked with confronting crime. It processes cases. It reacts to
individual acts of criminal behavior after
the fact.This is what must change.
Instead of a reactive system focused responding to individual criminal acts we
should have a true public safety model of justice that's focused on crime
prevention and reduction as well as creating and maintaining safer communities.

The
good news is that this is rapidly changing.The advent of community, or problem oriented, policing been very
beneficial to crime-ridden communities.Its principles

of
crime prevention by focusing on specific crime related problems, have spread to
the other justice components during the past twenty years.Community courts, community prosecution, and
community corrections are now becoming the norm.This has resulted in a remarkable drop in
crime.

Community
courts are now within neighborhoods to respond immediately to “quality of life
crimes”.They sentence offenders to
clean up crews and/or drug treatment.Community prosecutors work with citizens to evict drug-dealing tenants
from buildings.Community corrections
(probation and parole) officers have gotten out from behind their desks to
patrol the streets with police, clergy, and social service agencies to have
more effective control of those under their care.

These
strategies have produced remarkable results.The homicide rate fell 51 percent between 1993 and 2012 from 9.5 per
100,000 residents to 4.7 per 100,000. Property crime also fell sharply during
that time. Auto theft dropped an astounding 62 percent. It’s likely that these
trends will continue into the future.

These
phenomenal changes in criminal justice are not the result of passing more
laws.The criminal justice system has
changed its operating practices and partnered with the community and other
system components.This is what makes
this truly revolutionary.Instead of an
endless cycle of reform the system
has begun to transform itself.This bottom up change tends to confound
those accustomed to top down modification through new legislation.

Reform
movement experts remain clueless because they persist in trying to affect
change at the legislative and judicial levels.Meanwhile the criminal justice system continues its quiet revolution.

Ed Barajas retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons after twenty-seven years of service, including twelve years in three maximum security prisons. He began his career as a correctional officer right after graduating from college. He worked his way into management and administrative positions, including ten years with the National Institute of Corrections in Washington, DC. He has been a guest lecturer at universities and has written chapters of criminal justice textbooks and published articles and guest editorials in various periodicals. He and his wife live in North Carolina.

1 comment:

Interesting take on transformation as opposed to reformation....though I'm not clear what the difference is. You note that "instead of a reactive system" there needs to be more emphasis on community based solutions. I agree with that 100% except for the "instead of" part. It makes sense that both the reactive and proactive approaches to dealing with criminal behavior merit transformation.